A Review of ARC's Customer Web Review Process - ARC

Since the end of March, we’ve been asking for reviews from our customers. No Starbucks card, no discounts, no special incentives; just a simple request.

We wanted to find out what our customers would say about us if we weren’t in the room. We also wanted prospective customers to hear about us so they might feel more confident when working with us for the first time. And finally, we wanted to raise our profile a bit. After all, when a skyscraper goes up, you don’t hear much about who handled the data and documents that made it all happen.

In the past two months, we’ve been getting about a hundred reviews a day, and we’re fast approaching 3,000 submissions. More than 99% of them are five stars – as high a rating as we can get.

Some people think it’s too good to be true, but the simple fact is we’ve been serving design, construction and building management professionals for decades, and we get it. We understand how things work and what our customers need. While we do screw up from time to time, you have to look pretty hard to find examples of it, and that makes some people doubt the authenticity of our customers’ comments.

In the interest of transparency, here’s exactly how we handle reviews:

• A customer uses their local service center website to fill out a simple review form. It looks like this:

• After submitting the review, it shows up on the administrative portal of our website. If it’s three stars or above, and doesn’t contain objectionable material, we approve it immediately for publication. This is usually done within 12 hours.
• If a review comes in that has a negative or unclear comment, or is less than three stars, we flag it for the local manager. They have 24 hours to follow up, ensure we understand the issue, and see if we can make it better. After 24 hours, whether the issue has been resolved or not, we publish the negative review, often with an accompanying comment from our staff.
  Here’s an example from one of our SoCal branches who would have a flawless 5-star record were it not for a perfect storm of problems one afternoon that resulted in this review. (That said, we LOVE the way they responded):

• The only reviews we don’t publish are ones that contain profanity or language that would offend, rants with no discernible point, or reviews that are clearly malicious. Everything else gets published.

Most of the people who staff our service centers – not to mention those people who sell and service our Managed Print Services, Technology Solutions, Color Solutions, and supply our customers with Equipment and Supplies – really know what they’re doing. They are quality-focused, take pride in their work, and hustle for their customers. That’s the only reason why we get such positive reviews, and that’s why so many of our 90,000 customers keep coming back, job-after-job, year-after-year.

Do you have other questions about what we do and how we do it? Go to our homepage and click on the “Locations” link to find our locations around the world. You’ll find our email, phone numbers, and a map at the top of the search results page.

If you’re curious about other services we provide across the company, please explore our website beyond this blog, or call us at 925-949-5100.